Celebrate the Holidays like Jesus and Flip Off Your Local Church

“No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.”

-Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity

I have plenty of reasons to be pissed off at Jesus this Christmas. Not that I didn't have plenty of reasons to be pissed at Jesus last Christmas but over the years I just seem to collect more and more wounds inflicted on me in the name of Christ. As if spending decades in the closet of a backwoods Catholic church weren't enough, I seem to just keep vomiting up repressed memories of the lewd things the priests did to my body in that blackhole between their lessons on all the reasons my gender identity was going to send me straight to hell.

In order to survive this level of trauma at such a young age, I had to segregate my consciousness into five distinct dissociative identities to keep the secrets I couldn't tell even to myself. Thus, most of my alters are still children and always will be, so when another powerful sexual predator like Donald Trump declares "gender ideology" to be a symptom of terrorism and commands the fine people who torched the children at Waco to stomp it out, I get to experience this resurrection of Christian nationalism from the perspective of a freshly raped five-year-old trans girl.

So yes, dearest motherfuckers, I do indeed have many reasons to be pissed off, and I am not above lashing out. I use Norwegian Black Metal songs like lullabies to put my youngest alters to bed and I cannot drive past a church of any denomination without holding one finger high above my head. But I'm not pissed at Jesus, I'm pissed at Christians, and something tells me that Jesus would be too.

Christ is an ancient figure steeped in mythology and lore. There are thousands of interpretations of the motherfucker and what he represented. I can't pretend that my interpretations are any more or less legit than the next bitch with an ax to grind but I can tell you that I spent 11 years being indoctrinated in a parochial school and I spent another twenty studying scripture and the often-esoteric history that informs and frequently censors it in an attempt to unlearn that abuse. 

I have studied the Gospels, including the Gnostic ones, and I have poured over what ancient Islamic and Judaic texts have to say about Christ as well, not to mention the debates of a host of secular historians, linguists and philosophers on the matter.

So, the following is my own mythology, constructed from many sources over many years, and I stand by it as absolute chaos magick. Make of that what you will.

Jesus Christ was a shaggy-haired anarchist troubadour, a traveling mystical heretic delivering muckraking rants against the rich and the pious. Far from what the revisionists in Rome would have you believe, Jesus was a disgruntled Jew who despised the Old Testament and the gangsters who spewed it. Christ was hostile to pretty much all authority; banks, kings, empires... But he despised no seat of power more than "Moses' seat" in the temples of ancient Roman Judea. 

He went from town to town, passing right by these so-called houses of God and the pompous bigots who frequented them and then headed straight for the local red-light districts to rally whores, lepers and eunuchs against them. Christ taught these people that God was a divine spark within them and that they didn't require holy men to access enlightenment.

Jesus also spent plenty of time trashing those holy men. Referring to them variously as snakes, hypocrites, blind guides and play-actors. Accusing them of slamming the door to the Kingdom of Heaven in people's faces and devouring widow's houses while they sat on Moses' seat counting their gold. The only time Christ even stepped foot in a church, he flipped the fuck out, turning over tables and chasing moneychangers into the streets as he condemned their temple as a den of robbers. 

It's hard to imagine the fury that the stadium churches of today's millionaire Zionist Evangelicals would inspire in this mystic wildcard, but I imagine it would likely put the teenage church burning Satanists of the Norwegian Black Metal scene to shame. This is the Jesus I know and, in this light, even the wholesome fable of the first Christmas takes on a far more rambunctious flicker.  

After getting knocked up by an angel, Mary and her terrestrial side-piece Joseph fled Galilee on the orders of a census that was set to increase their taxes to the Roman imperial rump state of Judea. When King Harrod, the quisling in charge of this glorified colony, learned that holy men were traveling to Bethlehem to visit a newborn who might someday challenge his monopoly on power, he sent his own Waco death squad out to kill every male under two in the metropolitan area. Luckily, the Family Christ managed to dodge the pigs and go underground in Egypt until Harrod finally kicked and the heat died down. Then Young Jesus started kicking kings for kicks and the shit got real again...

Is any of this shit true? Who fucking knows. What I do know is that the Gospels served as an inspiration for heretics, peasants and revolutionaries long before they were hijacked by the same tyrants who likely had Jesus killed with a little help from the Pharisees that he spent his short life flipping off. Believe it or not, as a battered, raped and tormented closet case, it was actually Christian revolutionaries that gave me the strength to defend myself against the church and they continue to inform my radical contrarian ideology to this day.

I owe everything to proud Christian heretics like Jaques Ellul, Dorothy Day, Ivan Illich, Peter Maurin and Nikolai Berdyaev, and in the darkest days of my life, I have increasingly turned to the more Gnostic side of Christian mysticism, finding the strength to be the woman the Christians continue to conspire against me becoming through the divine feminine spirit of Sophia and the holy women defined by it; Mary Magdalene, Joan of Arc, Saint Brigitte and most of all, the Virgin Mary.

Faith isn't about what you can prove or what you can preach, it is about inner knowledge, gnosis, a personal kinship with the divine and how that inspires you to live or in my case survive. The church has declared war on me through another empire that uses a bad interpretation of the Bible to justify its conspiracy for global dominance and I have never felt closer to Christ in despising these cunts. In fact, I would argue that this current union of church and state is an excellent candidate for the Beast described in the Book of Revelations.

After all.... "The first beast comes up from the sea... it is given authority and power over every tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation." Or as Jaques Ellul put it, "All who dwell on earth worship it."

How is this not the Christian nationalist church of Pax Americana during the age of artificial intelligence and Donald Trump? Wasn't it the American Empire that first came from the sea with its battleships and gunboat diplomacy? Isn't it the state-bastardized version of Christianity that first sought global hegemony over every pagan tribe, every people, every tongue, and every nation? Can you honestly think of a better candidate for Antichrist than JD Vance, a Silicon Valley technofascist masquerading as a homespun Christian populist bumpkin?

It all fits like a noose around my neck but I'm not afraid to go down swinging. After all, the power of Jesus Christ Heretic compels me.

So, during this holiday season, with Judea in ashes and the poor man's pedophile Constantine languishing in the White House, I invite you to celebrate the birth of Christ the way he lived his life, by flipping off every church you pass and spitting in the eye of the powerful.

Mery fucking Christmas, dearest motherfuckers, and a happy intifada.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* I Have Forgiven Jesus by Morrissey

* The Pagan Winter by Darkthrone

* God by Tori Amos

* Leave Me in Hell by Venom

* Jesus Don't Want Me for His Sunbeam by Nirvana

* I am the Black Wizards by Emperor

* Jennifer's Body by Hole

* Crucify by Tori Amos

* Mary by Big Thief

* Pure Fucking Armageddon by Mayhem

The Mainstream Left Will Never Represent the Lumpenproletariat

 I've gone through this scenario a million fucking times before and it always seems to play out the same way. I meet some vanilla white progressive ally who feels my pain. You know the type; the non-profit industrial complex is crawling with them. The granola bro in vegan Chucks with a Bernie bumper sticker on his Prius just below a sticker for the latest Dempublican to cheat him out of another primary. The squeaky-clean Karen with the porcelain smile, surgically attached to an NPR tote bag full of positive affirmations and gluten-free cookies. They always start out super understanding. They have a lot of friends like me. They use all the right pronouns without missing a beat. But the moment shit gets complicated, that mask of wokeness slips and they start politely suggesting that I should just shut the fuck up and let my so-called allies carry my burden for me.

When I call them out for this micro-aggressive bullshit, they gaslight the shit out of me and tell me I'm getting "emotional" and that they "respect my feelings" but I didn't hear what I know I heard and I should just calm down. This is around the time when it dawns on me; it is way more goddamn important for these people to look woke than to be woke and that includes never having to apologize to people like me. This is also around the time when I have to step outside just to keep myself from proving them right by losing my fucking shit while they remain permanently Xanax calm. Fucking white people, right?

Here's the thing, I am fucking white people, at least according to the current census data definition of that label. But I'm also a very out-genderqueer person with five-alarm neurodiversity (five personalities and counting!) in a rural white community that has never exactly welcomed my existence. I grew up with white people; kids who repeatedly reminded me that I would never be one of them and adults who seemed convinced that I was dangerous because from a very young age there was something distinctly 'other' about me. This treatment continues to this day and it's exhausting, feeling like you are constantly under the surveillance of hateful eyes, holding your breath every time you pass a police car, and then having straight white people offer you help just to turn on you when your otherness becomes inconvenient to their hobby of playing savior with tranny lunatics like me. 

I don't equate my experience with that of people of color, especially considering that Queer neurodivergent people of color are basically statistically born dead. However, I can't afford to ignore the fact that many of the straight Black and brown people I know are the only neurotypical straight people who seem to even understand what I'm talking about when I'm talking about shit like this. I've known Black people from Dixie who have literally moved back to the South because at least there the racists don't pretend to be your friend which is the same reason why I avoid organizing in the suburbs. So many of us are just sick and tired of the passive-aggressive culture of the mainstream left. That's because all of us are members of the lumpenproletariat and the leaders of the mainstream left in this country are not. 

The lumpenproletariat is the outsider class, spit on even by Marx who referred to us as "social scum" and the "refuse of all classes." The term literally means "rag proletariat" and it includes all the poor people outside of the more traditional working class, the beggars, cripples, criminals, prostitutes, ex-cons and mental patients. The unemployed and the unemployable. The downwardly mobile. A genderfuck basket case eking out a meager existence on disability while cycling in and out of non-profits just to keep the demons at bay. Marx and Engels shit on all of us for lacking "class consciousness" but in reality, we are just poor people they can't unionize and govern beneath their leadership.

This prejudice is baked into the mainstream left across the west. The Social Democratic Party of Germany that set the pace for many progressives and social democrats across the globe during the late 19th and early 20th century made wide use of the term lumpenproletariat as a slur designed to exclude the "non-respectable poor" from those deemed worthy of proletariat status and create a more "desirable" working class. As the 20th century marched on and the SPD found themselves leading post-Imperial Germany, they came to view the lumpen as a biological threat to the health of a truly progressive society and much of the west followed suit with their asylums, reform schools, clinics, and other devices of social hygiene, much of which would also set the table for the Nazis.

In post-colonial America, the lumpenproletariat has always been overwhelmingly Black, brown, and/or Queer, and this isn't a coincidence. Trauma is the number one side-effect of white supremacy and the neurotypical gender binary, and this trauma keeps the lights on at the offices of the numerous industrial complexes that have kept white power alive and well long after the fall of Jim Crow. The Clinton Democrats, under the tutelage of Dixiecrats like Strom Thurmon, saw to that.

The National Institute of Health has consistently shown that the Black community suffers from the highest rate of PTSD out of any other racial group in this country and most studies generally show that just short of half of all LGBTQ+ identifying people suffer from that same psychic injury which is frequently misdiagnosed as any number of "mental illnesses." All of this seems to pave a road straight to the penitentiary for people who can't afford to be subdued by pharmaceuticals. 

Roughly half of all inmates in this country have been found to be experiencing a "mental health condition" and pretty much all of them have experienced some form of childhood trauma. Uncoincidentally, Black Americans are more than 6 times as likely to be imprisoned than whites with Latinos twice as likely and Queer people right in between at 3 times as likely as straight people with 16% of all trans people having served time.

I've been fortunate enough to dodge prison in the sticks, but this relative privilege came with the constellation prize of being chewed up by a wide variety of for-profit mental health institutions that gave me dozens of diagnoses and God knows how many pills before I finally discovered that the primary source of my ailments was the trauma I suffered as a gender non-conforming child at a Catholic school that essentially served me up like a pudding to pedophile priests so those pillars of white heterosexuality could steer me in the right direction with their cocks.

The left did finally hear the cry of the lumpenproletariat, but it would take Queer thinkers like Michelle Foucault and thinkers of color like Frantz Fanon to articulate our pain in a language straight white people could understand. The latter, a psychiatrist by trade, would largely reinvent the word lumpenproletariat with his landmark manifesto, The Wretched of the Earth, in which Fanon studied a number of asylums and discovered mental distress to largely be a symptom of capitalist and post-colonialist exploitation. Doctor Fanon also recognized that those suffering under such conditions were a lot less likely to suffer from colonial class indoctrination and were thus a lot more willing to revolt against the status quo.

This wasn't exactly news to barely closeted Queer anarchists like Mikhail Bakunin and Max Stirner who had long preached way back in the 19th century that those of us in the rag class already represented a kind of actually existing anarchism simply by daring to exist outside the confines of mainstream society. They knew what Frantz and Foucault found out, that we were just crazy enough to kick ass without a manifesto to tell us how to do it and we proved this in spades during the sixties and seventies.

The last time the left brought this country to the brink of revolution it was under the leadership of the Black Power Movement that ignited the imagination of the entire lumpenproletariat by simply passing around the goddamn microphone. No organization embodied this spirit of revolutionary dialogue better than the Black Panther Party who openly courted the urban lumpenproles for support with Huey Newton lionizing this cadre as "street brothers"; an organized paramilitary force of ex-cons and ex-gangbangers turning their arms on the systems of oppression that alienated them from society.  

Dozens of other armed revolutionaries from the gutters of Babylon followed suit, from the fags and dykes of the Gay Liberation Front to the streetwalking gender outlaws of STAR, from the reservation dog soldiers of AIM to the Latino lowriders of the Young Lords who even developed a "Lumpen Organization" within their ranks and captured the mood of the times when they boldly proclaimed "It's a law of revolution that the most oppressed group takes the leadership position."

The climax came when the Illinois chapter of the Panthers, led by a young visionary named Fred Hampton, tried to organize these tribes under a single Rainbow Coalition with the intention of not just confronting the state but replacing it with parallel institutions for community welfare that took the chronically unemployed off the government dole. The government couldn't have this, so they shot Fred Hampton. They shot Bunchy Carter, they shot Malcolm X, and they locked up Huey and Bobby Seale, and they framed Leonard Peltier and Geronimo Pratt, and they let an entire generation of Black Queer and Black and Queer revolutionaries die of AIDS.

Then the universities took over, and the big labor unions marched back in with the Democrats on speed dial along with a host of moneyed non-profits organized from the top down like corporations. All of these institutions, all of them, are overwhelmingly led by elderly straight white men and even their diversity programs are largely devices of gatekeeping and tokenization that only afford the most assimilated minorities, aka the least lumpen minorities, access to positions of power. And thus, I find myself getting gaslit and disenfranchised by cis-passing white transwomen who run DEI programs at fucking Raytheon (sadly, a true story.)

We the unwashed lumpenproletariat need to rediscover our voice. We need to get the fucking microphone back. Cointelpro stole it from us and I'm sick and tired of barrowing the DNC's in exchange for another slice of my pride.

The problem on the mainstream left today is almost identical to the problem on the right. They are both run by old white cis het men for old white cis het men. The only difference is that the right admits it while the left just uses minorities like human shields while they kill Muslims with drones and organize the global bourgeoisie beneath decaying relics of progressive internationalism like the EU and the UN. Well, no more. No more Weimar allies buttering us up with petty privileges while the Nazis gather their guns.

We need our own goddamn guns, our own clinics, our own schools, our own parties and organizations run from the bottom up by our own people. Paler Queer folk and neurodivergent trailer trash also need to abandon what's left of our white privilege and throw in our lot with our true comrades, with street brothers and reservation dog soldiers, in the name of lumpen power. The poor need to become a storm over the white pride parade of the two-party oligarchy. The lumpenproletariat must come together again like a rainbow fist and smash the pigfucker state once and for all.

Maybe then I can play nice with bougie vanilla leftists but I'm not making any promises.

Peace, Rage, & Solidarity- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Sunday Morning by the Velvet Underground

* I Against I by Bad Brains

* Down to Be Wrong by HAIM

* Rich Daddy by the Dicks

* Easier Said by Sunflower Bean

* Retard Girl by Hole

* Braille by Regina Spektor

* List of Demands by Saul Williams

* Wolf Like Me by TV On the Radio

* Drunk Walk Home by Mitski

You Can Put America First by Destroying MAGA: A Message for a Post-Trump Isolationist Movement

 "What transforms this world is... Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed."

Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavillion

As someone who lives in Trump Country but frequently moves in left-wing circles online, I have heard a lot of nasty things about Trump supporters and plenty of them are true. I didn't exactly have a great time growing up Queer in a town where boys are raised to believe that manhood is defined by torturing kids like me. Rural Pennsylvania can certainly be a cruel place to the strange little creatures. 

So yes, my neighbors can be pig-headed, short-sighted, close-minded, assholes who lash out at people they choose to know nothing about, but they're also a few other things that grab far fewer headlines. My neighbors are also hard-working, outsourced, war weary, poor folk, acutely aware of the fact that they have been getting played for generations by a system rigged against them by Wall Street and much of their petty prejudices are mirrored by some of their city slicking liberal critics who take about as much time to comprehend country people as country people do to understand trans kids and Somalian immigrants.

It's easy to be terrified of a boogeyman you've never met before, and Republicans aren't the only monster's adept at playing this game. For decades now Democrats have used the specter of the redneck deplorable to scare Queer folk and people of color into voting for slightly more passive aggressive white supremacists like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, but their caricature of rural monstrosity is only a fraction of the story at best. What most MSDNC shitlibs leave out of their grotesque portraits of rust belt, white trash, MAGA folk is the fact that most of these people were actually motivated to vote for Donald Trump largely as a reckless act of vengeance against the two-party system.

In 2016, the GOP was pushing another Bush, the Democrats were pushing another Clinton, and both teams were equally horrified by the scatological antics of a foul-mouthed, dayglow ginger, rodeo clown who seemed more committed to the LOLs than he did to any coherent ideology. The people of my native Pennsyltucky had spent the worst part of the last twenty-something years losing everything to a Clinton or a Bush administration. They had their factories sold out from under them by shitty trade deals and their kids sent to die in wars that never seemed to end or add up. To put a long diatribe short, regardless of how I feel about the people I grew up with, they worked hard and paid their taxes to a couple of parties who fucked them until they couldn't walk straight in the name of globalism.

Trump was one of the few candidates to actually address this fact and he did so while horrifying the media that helped the Bush and Clinton dynasties to get away with it. Most of the people I knew who voted for Trump in 2016 did it to get even. That doesn't make voting for a race-baiting serial rapist acceptable, but it does make it somewhat understandable to a transgender feminist who has watched both of these parties take turns feeding my people one lie after another while feeding one abused sex worker after another to the prison industrial complex. Shit like that made me crazy enough to route for Putin as a badly closeted communist. So, I get how easily oppression can lead to temporary insanity.

The trouble with MAGA was that the insanity stuck. Trump's first four years in power should have shot the illusion that he was some kind of isolationist in bronze armor to shit. The bastard ripped up the JCPOA, sold Ukraine the offensive weaponry that convinced Putin to invade, gave Israel the green light to rape and pillage Jerusalem, and facilitated a Saudi genocide in Yemen. Not to mention that he stacked his cabinet to the gills with neocon vampires like Mike Pompeo, Eliot Abrams and John Bolton.

But the mainstream media didn't really cover any of this. They mostly just stuck to the narrative that Donald Trump was some kind of dangerous, Putin appeasing, NATO stomping, old right nationalist to which your average MAGA supporter responded by doubling down on their support for a man who could have easily been exposed as just another cold-blooded swamp monster if the news wasn't too busy defending cold-blooded swamp monsters to do so. 

Biden won in a coma in 2020 largely thanks to COVID and then graciously took the blame for Trump's blowback by doing nothing to stop it. The JCPOA remained in tatters, Russia invaded a nation Trump armed to the teeth, and Hamas went on a rampage that Trump's servitude to the Israel Lobby inspired. Then the Democrats made it worse when they ignored their base and ran Kamala as some kind of Zionist Oprah posing with the Cheney's while Trump scored points with all the young bros on the blogosphere.

The Democrats and the Republicans pretty much tripped over each other to make Trump's reanimation possible and in 2025, their mess has become a menace worth being hysterical over. Donald Trump has always been his own worst enemy. The man's pathological ego has always been the stuff that psycho killers and dictators are made of. However, his erratic mood swings and gawdy lack of anything resembling class have always kept him from acquiring the kind of establishment gravitas necessary to make him dangerous to anyone but migrants and Muslims. 

That all changed during the last election when Elon Musk and a host of other Silicon Valley billionaires decided to hedge their bets on a wild card in a gamble to put a man in the White House impulsive enough to let them replace the old military industrial complex with Artificial Intelligence. The bet paid off and now Trump finally has the corporate sponsorship to play Hitler for real this time.

Perhaps the only good news here is that it turns out that some of Trump's supporters really did want to put America first and are finally displaying a little buyer's remorse and it's about fucking time. No sane human being could possibly consider that psychopath to be an actual conservative while he micromanages the liquidation of the Gaza Strip and uses borders and cartels as an excuse to shred what's left of the Constitution and hand the Federal Government over to Palantir. The man being outed as a pedophile didn't exactly help either. I guess even neo-Nazis have a red line.

In recent weeks the fallout has become downright torrential with even Marjorie Taylor Greene turning on her beloved Übermensch over the Epstein files before cowering in a corner at the spectacle of her own unexpected chivalry. But it's Venezuela that looks primed to be the tipping point. 

With Little Marco whispering sweet nothings in his ear, Donald Trump has followed the neocon playbook every step of the way on this one. Making up phony threats to national security with totally fabricated cartels. Changing the dictionary to define America's addiction to hard drugs and cheap labor as a license for total war. Bypassing Congress, the Constitution and international law to unilaterally demand regime change at the barrel of a cannon. It's all there and America sees it. 70% of those polled across party lines in a recent CBS News poll oppose military action in Venezuela.

Republican Senator Rand Paul probably summed it up best when he said: "If he invades Venezuela or gives more money to Ukraine, his movement will dissolve." Such a fabulously catastrophic outcome should be approached as an opportunity to all those who truly seek to dissolve Donald Trump and the evil empire for which he stands in a vat of molten lava. MAGA has become an increasingly sick cult of braindead foot soldiers devoted to a Big Mac gagging Caligula, but the America First Movement that developed in the run-off of this panic factory has some legitimately descent values to stand by. 

My neighbors are right to disdain globalism, forever wars and the deep state. They are correct in observing that all of these imperial vices rob the homeland to rape the third world. But they are going to need to purge themselves of more than just Trump to forge a truly affective revolutionary movement.

While paleolibertarians likes Rand Paul and Thomas Massie are laying down the groundwork for a post-Trump America First Movement that could easily become the kind of gateway drug to anarchism that Rand's father's movement proved to be in the wake of Bush, opportunistic trolls like Tucker Carlson are taking things in a far darker direction, glorifying oligarchs like Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin while pushing uncut antisemitism and backing unrepentant neo-Nazi parasites like Nick Fuentes.

This is why anti-fascism needs to be injected into any form of Isolationism to keep it from mutating into national chauvinism. The brilliant Japanese isolationist Yukio Mishima correctly observed that the death of the Japanese nation came with the birth of the Japanese Empire, that foreign entanglements like initiatory war disintegrate the integrity of any truly benevolent culture. He should have taken it one step further and recognized that unchecked power itself is defined by the disintegration of everything that stands in its way, including the people it is supposed to put first.

It's not too late for my neighbors to learn this lesson but someone has to be willing to deliver it to them without burning them at the stake. That means weird people like me agreeing to drop our own prejudices and preconceived notions at the door as long as my neighbors are willing to meet me halfway by doing the same.

Color me a contrarian, but this is one genderfuck anarchist willing to give it a shot. How about you?

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* All the Young Dudes by Mott the Hoople

* Joiner by Blondshell

* Mamma Tried by Merle Haggard

* In Bloom by Nirvana

* Down to be Wrong by HAIM

* Psycho Killer by Talking Heads

* Liar by Rollins Band

* Goodbye Stranger by Supertramp

* Working Class Hero by John Lennon & the Plastic Ono Band

* All My Life by Foo Fighters

It's Time to Make America Truly Tribal Again

 Way back in the 1700s there was this fucked up little place called Florida, or at least that's what the Spaniards called it. The original natives of the region had multiple different names for this untamable swampland but most of them were wiped out by slaughter and disease from the Conquistadors who declared the wild mess, Florida. They didn't last long though. In fact, those butchers only managed to build and populate a few colonialist missions before their glorious Catholic empire collapsed in the tall grass surrounding them and, in spite of such efforts, most of Florida remained a verdant wilderness teeming with all kinds of shit that freaked white people the fuck out- snakes, alligators, mosquitos, humidity... 

But there was one tribe of Indians just wild enough to call this no-man's-land home.

The colonialists called them the Seminole, which was believed to be derived from the Spanish word "cimerones", meaning "untamed" or "runaway." It had originally been used as a pejorative for Native Americans who rejected mission life and Roman Catholicism in order to flee and live "wild" in the snake infested forests. But this wasn't just any tribe. The Seminole were a nation of refugees, the product of ethnogenesis, a collection of different disparate ethnicities joining together to create a new one. 

Most of their original members were renegades and outcasts exiled from existing tribes, most significantly the Muscogee Creeks of what is now called Georgia and Alabama but also Choctaw, Yamasee, Yuchi and eventually free Africans, escaped slaves and even a few disenfranchised white colonialists. They all came together in the wilderness to live free, and they thrived where white men feared to tread, building an identity over the centuries defined by their collective refusal to be governed by any force but nature.

They organized themselves into autonomous, self-governing, villages called Italwa that cooperated for mutual defense and built a thriving trade network on the largely abandoned ruins of the Spanish Empire. It was their diversity that set them apart though and made them far more independent than the other local Creek based tribes. It was also this diversity that would eventually make them a target of another burgeoning empire known as the United States of America.

By the 19th Century, the Seminoles had accepted so many escaped slaves from nearby plantations that these darker skinned refugees formed their own distinct band dedicated to preserving their own unique culture under Seminole protection while also enjoying the right to bear arms. They called them Black Seminoles, and they quickly established an alliance between wild Indians and escaped slaves that threatened the monopoly on force held by white Southern planters with a growing network of underground railroads. 

In other words, the Seminole had to go and thus began the Seminole Wars.

Three conflicts were fought between the years of 1816 and 1858. The first was also America's first major military intervention on foreign soil lead by a sadistic General named Andrew Jackson for the express purpose of recovering escaped slaves, and it was Andrew Jackson who would lead America into the second and deadliest of those wars about a decade later when he was elected president. For nearly 7 years, less than 2,000 Seminole warriors schooled over 30,000 heavily armed American troops in swampland guerrilla warfare, picking them off like mosquitos in hit-and-run attacks and then disappearing back into the stags like ghosts.

It was the longest, deadliest and most expensive Indian War this empire has ever engaged in. As many as 2,000 American troops died in that filthy black water, a population of corpses that matched the size of the entirety of the Seminoles' armed forces. The Americans only won the war the way Americans have ever won a war, by targeting and starving their adversaries' families and subjecting civilians to genocide in order to force real warriors to surrender.  

However, while most of the Seminoles begrudgingly agreed to flee the land they made their own for the glorified concentration camps of Oklahoma, a few small bands never surrendered, choosing to retreat even deeper into that fucked up little place where they remain unconquered to this day in what has now become known as the Everglades. The Southern planters even attempted to reach out to these bloodied but unbowed renegades in a desperate hunt for allies during the Civil War. The Seminoles told them to fuck off. They remained neutral.

This is one of my favorite stories in the often-depressing pantheon of American history for a number of reasons. As a Queer person, any story about a band of outcasts forging a new identity in resistance to their oppressors is kind of like hyperfocus candy for my distinctly neurodivergent brain. But more than anything, the story of the Seminole Nation is a story that proves that ethnicity or tribal identity is mutable and that bioregionalism is far stronger than traditional Westphalian nationalism. It is historical proof that the American Empire is a mirage built on totally manufactured constructs like race and borders, and that these constructs can be destroyed.

The fatal flaw at the heart of both the left and the right in this country is the nightmare known as the American Dream. A contrived notion that any form of political universalism writ large over such a vast and diverse physical space can ever lead to anything but tyranny regardless of what label you put on it. Perhaps the most devastating label of all is the western concept of race as a biological construct with its deadliest byproduct being that godless religion known as whiteness.  The very notion of white people was invented for the express purpose of homogenizing the entirety of the European diaspora into a single globalized master race.

I guess it kind of worked, at least for a while. America is still the deadliest empire on earth and much of that empire is built upon the bedrock of white supremacy. But just like the Spanish Empire before them, America is rapidly collapsing into the abyss beneath the weight of its own sins, leaving a vast population of 'white people' without any form of ethnic identity other than conquest to cling to. And cling they do, to Proud Boys and Heritage Foundations and vile technofascist juntas. To a very polluted and historically color blind form of tribalism. But we shouldn't let this sickness pollute the word 'tribe' any more than we should let it pervert the word 'God.'

That would be truly tragic because the solution to this problem, of how to free people from being the willing hostages of a thrashing international leviathan as it drowns in its own blood, may actually be to turn to a sort of historical bioregionalism based on the kind of tribalism which has always been natural to this region of the world. This doesn't mean indulging in cultural chauvinism or cultural appropriation. It means doing what the Seminole did and building new nations in contradiction to these things. 

The indigenous people of these so-called Americas are still here and still fighting to define themselves but if any of us are going to live peacefully on this land with them after the inevitable collapse of the empire that failed to extinguish them, we should probably start looking to them for more influence than the host of dead white men still worshipped by both sides of academia.

As noted above, I believe that the best way to do this is by embracing bioregionalism, a philosophy of green localism that calls on societies to organize themselves small around the natural boundaries of bioregions and to actively engage with a process of becoming native to these environments by learning and embracing their ecological and cultural history. This is precisely what the Seminole did in the wilds of colonial Florida, and they did it in a way that didn't involve them forcing their will upon anyone. They built a vibrant new cultural identity by uniting the shards of the many ethnicities that joined beneath their flag and adapting them to the environment that offered them sanctuary. 

The Seminoles were not alone. Many indigenous nations existed in small, decentralized, non-hierarchical, societies long before some white dude declared this anarchism. The Iraquois Confederacy and the Navajo Dine developed complex societies that united many cultures in harmony with nature through cooperation and collective responsibility. Europeans once did too in places like Medieval Iceland and Gaelic Ireland. You can also detect streaks of this stateless spirit among the outliers of post-colonial Euro-American culture such as the Cajuns of the Bayou and the numerous sects of Anabaptists across America's badly scarred heartland.

This is what I seek to achieve with my own community of mostly pale-faced rural Queer folk on the ruins of the Appalachian rust belt. A borderless confederacy of autonomous and anti-colonialist tribal communities built around our shared traditions of multi-ethnic Queerness and anti-authoritarian neurodivergence, fostered by the agrarian traditions of the land we now call home. A series of farms, communes, co-ops and homesteads living off the land with our own network of schools, militias, small businesses and mutual aid societies to sustain us while still living in harmony with whatever other voluntary cultures surround us.

We can't replace the native people who once occupied these hollers, and we wouldn't dare to try. The Shawnee who once called my little corner of Pennsyltucky home suffered a similar fate as many of the Seminoles, being ethnically cleansed by that 19th century Donald Trump, Andrew Jackson, with his genocidal 1830 Indian Removal Act. 

But we can honor the last nations to live off this land sustainably and more importantly we can learn from them. We can do what the Seminole dared to do and forge a new stateless existence in the age of Orange Ozymandias by making America truly tribal again.

Peace, Love & Empathy- Nicky/CH

Soundtrack: Songs that Influenced this Post

* Even the Losers by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

* Tribe by Gruntruck

* The Flag by Royal Trux

* The Wrong Year by the Decemberists

* Heroes by David Bowie

* The King of Spain by the Tallest Man on Earth

* The Druid by Sleep

* Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes

* Anaconda by the Melvins

* Territorial Pissings by Nirvana